March 19, 2012

Looks like HuffPo, the “internet newspaper,” might soon become a term paper mill.

Huffington Post College tweeted late last night: “Want to publish your senior thesis on the Huffington Post? Email rharrington [at] huffingtonpost [dot] com for more details.”

(H/T @mylestanzer, a former Voice intern who sometimes contributes to RS).

We admit: Runnin’ Scared’s first reaction was something along the lines of “WTF?” — since it looks like students won’t get any payment for these lengthy projects.

Now, to be clear, students don’t usually get paid for theses, but academic institutions tend to be not-for-profit ventures, so they would not stand to benefit financially from free content like a for-profit media company would.

(Full disclosure: The Voice does have unpaid interns, but they must receive academic credit to participate in the program. At one point, this writer was a participant.)

Anyway, RS reached out to Huffington Post to get more info.

We wanted to know: How does the thesis publishing work, exactly? Do participating students get a byline? Do universities get any sort of credit? Are the theses published in full?

We’ll update if we hear back.

From an exchange of tweets, it looks like this idea surfaced several weeks ago, when Arianna Huffington pitched the idea at a dinner with some students.

In that convo,@eliglazier told @mylestanzer: “free. Yeah” in regards to the program.

But this wouldn’t be the first time that it’s been tried — HuffPo offered to publish theses in April 2010.